Heart of Palm (13 page)

“Be back, you two,” he said to Mac and Susan.

“Think about it, Frank,” Susan called after him. “Don’t miss out on this.” And whether she was talking about letting her sell his house or something quite different, or both, he could not tell. But he had a feeling.

F
OUR

At eight o’clock, an hour before the scheduled start of the fireworks, the deck off the back of Uncle Henry’s was creaking precipitously with the weight of some of Utina’s finest—T-shirts stretched taut over bellies and bosoms, generous tushes perched ingloriously on resin chairs and along the deck’s wooden railings, faces slick with perspiration and squinting into the still-brutal rays of the evening sun. The heat notwithstanding, it was a cheerful bunch. A woman in a floral halter top held a lit sparkler in her teeth. A man in a Gators cap bellowed merrily for more beer. Even Irma, the waitress, seemed buoyed, stomping with less than her usual venom back and forth between the bar inside and the raucous crowd on the deck. The water was a beautiful sparkling silver. Two little girls had the giggles. But Arla Bravo, the restaurant’s owner, was thinking enough was enough.

She was here against her will to begin with, and all evening she’d been fighting the sullen desire to say something nasty to someone, anyone. A crude or cruel enough remark would create a reason for Frank to throw up his hands and send her and Sofia home, where Arla could endure the rest of the evening in relative peace. But the problem was that no one in her family had spent enough time with her yet for her to sling that arrow. Frank had been busy behind the bar since four o’clock. Carson had collected Arla and Sofia from Aberdeen, had driven to Uncle Henry’s and waited impatiently while they executed a debate in the parking lot over whether to bring their purses inside or lock them in the car. Then he deposited his mother and sister unceremoniously inside the restaurant before assuming his position on a barstool between Mac Weeden and Susan Holm. Carson’s wife, Elizabeth, was out on the back deck, having staked a claim to two of the seats with the best view of the fireworks for herself and Bell. Arla sat out there with them for a while, but it was too hot, so she came back inside and resigned herself to a round of Sudoku at an empty table. Sofia sat alone at one end of the bar, gazing out to the deck and picking at an order of fried okra.

Arla sighed. “Oh, hell,” she said. The woman at the table next to her looked at Arla from under a red, white, and blue visor. The woman’s shirt was embroidered with an American flag, with small silver sequins representing stars. Arla wanted to smack her.

“Excuse me?” the woman said.

“What’s that?” Arla said. She tipped her head to one side, feigning a hearing impairment.

“I thought you said something.”

“What’s that?” Arla said, louder.

The woman turned back to her margarita, rolling her eyes at her dinner companion, a pink-faced man with a coconut shrimp in each hand. Irma stalked by with a tray of dinners, and Arla watched her, tried to catch her eye to commiserate about the idiocy of the situation, but Irma ignored her.

“It’s Arla Bravo,” she heard the sequined woman whisper to the man across the table, and Arla winced as she realized her feigned hearing loss might have now backfired on her. “The owner,” the woman continued. “Used to be Bolton. You know. Used to be all
that
. But now . . .” The woman’s voice trailed off, and she shook her head.

Arla closed the Sudoku book and stuffed it into her purse. She stood up abruptly, jostling the basket of condiments on the table. She grabbed her cane and walked across the dining room and over to Sofia at the end of the bar. Outside, the crowd on the deck had begun to sing “Yankee Doodle.”

“Oh, for the love of Jesus,” she said. And this was the insanity of it all, these pointless gatherings, these incessant holidays. Dressing up and singing like a pack of idjits, carrying on drinking until all hours in the name of Memorial Day, or Independence Day, or Labor Day. The summer holidays were the worst, nothing but pure stupid. No cool air or lovely pies or pretty lights to look at. Just sweat and noise.

But good for business. She looked at Frank, who was moving quickly behind the bar to slide bottles of beer across to the customers standing two deep, hands outstretched, holding tens and twenties between damp fingers. Frank kept a bottle opener tied to his right wrist with a leather strap, and she watched as he moved in one fluid swoop to pull a Michelob from the cooler, swing the opener up into his hand, snap off the metal cap, and slide the bottle down the bar. He had a grace to him, Frank, that had escaped the rest of her children, who all, she often thought, took after their father.

“Sofia,” Arla said, “why did we come?”

“Frank wanted us to,” Sofia said. “Quit being negative.” She looked around the dining room and sighed. Arla wanted to shake her. What a day this had been. Sofia in her bedroom at the crack of dawn throwing her things out the window. The Steinway still parked in the middle of the hallway at home. And all of it, all of it under the shadow of this wretched holiday. This hateful, wretched day.

“You’re not enjoying this any more than I am,” Arla said. “Why don’t you call Biaggio to come get us?” In the old days she would have simply set off through the wooded path to Aberdeen, but these days she trusted neither her balance nor her endurance to take her through the overgrown pathway, which was a fifteen-minute walk through thick, gnarled roots and patches of slippery mud along the bank of the Intracoastal. She missed that walk. She’d stop and visit with Drusilla along the way, sit for a while by the headstone in the woods and talk to Drusilla about what she’d loved and what she’d lost and about why they always had to be the same things. But for the past five years—maybe more? she’d lost track—she’d had to travel by car to get to and from Uncle Henry’s, down the long winding driveway of Aberdeen, half a mile north on Monroe, and back in through the dusty sand approach to the restaurant.

The problem was that neither Arla nor Sofia drove. In Arla’s case, she’d given it up for good years ago, after that accident on Seminary Street, when she tried to push the clutch with the rubber tip of her cane, but it slipped off and she’d gotten confused with the pedals; the Impala bolted over the curb and into the brick pilasters of Sterling’s Drugstore. “Just thank God no one was hurt,” the policeman said, looking at Arla pointedly. She returned home hours later, still shaking from the fear and the shame, clutching a moving violation and a hefty insurance estimate. She hung the car keys on a metal hook inside the kitchen cabinet and closed the door.

She realized now that not driving was one of the things that had aged her prematurely, had made her dependent on her sons and on Biaggio in a geriatric way that annoyed and embarrassed her. She was only sixty-two, for God’s sake. Sometimes she felt like she was ninety.

And Sofia, well, you’d think Sofia could have picked it up—driving—but operating a motor vehicle was just one more of the many things that Arla’s daughter simply opted not to do. She’d tried it once as a teenager and had been so frightened by the enormity of it, the act of moving such a monstrously large piece of metal at high speeds with just the slightest pressure from her own tentative foot, that she’d never driven again. Arla didn’t suppose Sofia, at forty-three now, was about to try it again. Hell.

She looked at her daughter. Sofia was still a striking woman, having inherited her own towering height and her father’s blue eyes. Her hair, bright red, was thick and generous, though she kept it constantly pulled back in a severe ponytail, with two artfully arranged wisps at her temples. She was not fat; however her height and presence often made people think she was. She was a big woman.

Oh, she hadn’t had it easy, Sofia. Depression and anxiety, the doctors had said. Mood swings. Control issues. “She’s trying to create her comfort zone,” one therapist said. Well, no wonder, what with everything going so wrong the way it did, back then. And oh, my God, even before that, that awful business with the professor. But Arla had tried so hard, for Sofia. The doctors had prescribed medications, which Sofia had never wanted to take, and had given Arla special directions: Watch the diet. Reduce stress. Keep a routine. Exercise regularly. None of those treatments took, of course, not at Aberdeen, where the pantry staples ran to Little Debbie cakes and Tang, and where these days the most strenuous exercise came in the form of climbing the dim staircase after a marathon of rerun sitcoms and
late-night movies.

Of course, in the old days it had been different. Sofia had always been nervous, unpredictable, of course, but she’d been more or less normal as a little girl, before all these awful
conditions
had set in.
Diagnoses
, what have you. Such fear, all the time. Panic attacks on the school playground. Temper tantrums at home. And yet, such a beautiful girl, still beautiful today, but back then just stunning, that long red hair, those faint golden lashes. She was like Arla herself, once long ago. Sofia did well in school, never made waves, the teachers all loved her, which was a relief for Arla, given the three wild boys who followed and the fits she’d had keeping them all on track in school. Back then, Sofia was the easy one. And the pointe lessons—oh, the pointe! How she missed it. Sofia had been a lovely ballerina, strong and powerful. She’d even danced in
The Nutcracker
that one winter in St. Augustine, en pointe for both acts, night after night for the two weeks leading up until Christmas, and Arla was never so proud in her life. A dewdrop, a snowflake,
and
the first understudy for Clara. My word. Onstage, the light had played off Sofia’s hair and Arla had felt sorry, had felt downright pity for all the other parents. Those poor, plain people.
Nobody
had a daughter as lovely, as special, as rare as Sofia.

That was a long time ago. Twenty-five years? Thirty? The math was confounding. Every year, the damn math got harder, and every year, she and Sofia got older, more dug in, more resistant to the changes that could have revived them, could have renewed them. Now, Uncle Henry’s was getting more crowded, and Arla was longing for her kitchen, for mugs of Chablis, for the quiet, comfortable feeling of having her daughter need her company. But damn if Sofia was cooperating.

“I’m not calling Biaggio,” Sofia said. “Frank wants us here. You call Biaggio, if you want.”

But Frank would be mad at her if she insisted on leaving early, before the fireworks. He’d been pestering her lately for staying in, for “not trying hard enough,” for spending too many evenings at home with Sofia and the Home Shopping Network. “You never even come to the restaurant anymore,” he said, over and over. “It’s
your
frigging restaurant. I just work there. You ought to make an appearance now and then.” Now, what kind of son would talk to his mother that way?

“Carson will be there,” he’d said. “He’s bringing Bell for the fireworks. Come spend time with your granddaughter.”

Oh, but what did it matter? Carson didn’t care whether she was here or not. She looked out through the windows at the back of the dining room to the deck. Elizabeth looked over her shoulder just then—the timing was odd, as if she could sense she was being watched—and she caught Arla’s eye and smiled. Elizabeth was like that. She would smile at the damndest times, like when her husband was inside the bar chatting up everyone and anyone but leaving his wife and daughter to fight their way for seats to watch the fireworks on Independence Day. And yet Elizabeth would smile. Arla used to think the girl was simple. But she’d come to the conclusion she was simply decent. More decent than the man she’d married, even Arla had to admit. She raised her eyebrows at Elizabeth, then rolled her eyes. She lifted her hand to wave Elizabeth and Bell in to the restaurant, have them sit here at the bar, cool off for a bit, maybe have a cup of chowder and some corn fritters. But then the crowd on the deck shifted and Elizabeth was hidden from view, and Arla felt irritable and lonesome again.

And hot. Oh, my Lord in heaven, hot. Her shirt stuck like cellophane to the lower part of her back, and her thighs felt swollen and confined inside her Bermuda shorts, like fat bratwursts in casing. The air-conditioning inside Uncle Henry’s was no use. With the back windows thrown so maddeningly, festively open to the Intracoastal, the restaurant felt like a piece of Tupperware, the air inside so humid and dank you could scarcely breathe. Why not just flush the electric payment right down the toilet?

But she
owned
Uncle Henry’s. She should be the
boss
, and yet so many other people seemed to be telling her what to do. Come here. Go there. Stand up. Sit down.
Relax
. She’d had it.

It wasn’t like this in the old days. She’d bought the restaurant not long after Dean had left her. She remembered the transaction like it was yesterday, sitting down with Charleen, Uncle Henry’s daughter, at the People’s Guarantee on Seminary Street, signing the papers with her right hand while her left hand shook on her lap beneath the table, marking her first
official
foray into the world of the working class, her first
real
dalliance with the ranks of the gainfully employed. Back then, the church linens were only a tiny sideline, a little boost to Dean’s income as a boiler tech but never enough to actually affect the bottom line or define Arla’s professional ambitions. She was a Bolton, after all, never forget it, a blue-blooded woman raised on fine china and six-hundred-thread-count sheets. She never planned to work. Until Dean had orchestrated his exit and left her with Sofia and Frank still living at home, a monthly tax bill, and a fat balance on the Visa, she’d never once considered her own potential as a breadwinner, or a rainmaker, or an
entrepreneur
, what have you. But the money left to her by her parents—a disappointing sum to begin with, once James’s business debts were exposed—was dwindling fast. It had been enough to pay off the mortgage on Aberdeen, enough to supplement the boiler job and cover the gaps left by Dean’s increasingly erratic work ethic. But it wouldn’t have lasted much longer. And then she bought Uncle Henry’s. Before the ink had dried on the sales contract she felt a thrill like never before, an empowerment born of necessity but welcomed like a change-of-life baby. She was Arla Bravo. She owned a restaurant. She was going to make money. She pictured a dining room full of revelers, a kitchen full of karma, a register full of cash.
Uncle Henry’s Bar & Grill. Arla Bravo, Proprietor
. She liked the ring of it.